Hello, world.

Hello, to everyone reading this!

My name is Alex. I'm a lead software engineer at Cancer Research UK. I work in London, UK and I live in Exeter. I am also a long time reader/lurker.

I absolutely love the Dev.to community. It's so inclusive and welcoming. The mods do an amazing job keeping it that way. The content, posted by authors here is so varied, interesting, and fun to read.

I've been a software engineer for the past 11 years roughly. I began my journey into software development during secondary school, building games in the console, in RPGMaker 2K3, 3D game maker, and DarkBasic Pro. I particularly enjoyed building websites and designing databases in my ICT and Business and Communication Systems GCSEs.

I'm married and been with my wife for 11 years. We live together with our rabbit Digby. As you may be able to tell. He is in charge.

I specialise in back-end web technologies including PHP and Python. I am also very familiar with JavaScript and C++. I got well acquainted with Java during my second and third years at uni. I've recently begun familiarising myself with C and Go.

Most of my experience to date has been with website development. However, in the last few years, I have been involved in some relatively large scale systems and applications.

In my last role, I lead a small team in building a high-availability, distributed CRM. But my main project, which I spent a great deal of time on, was a routing engine and RESTful API. I spend roughly 2 1/2 years working on it and improving it, failure resistant and very well optimised for it's hosting environment. If you have any questions just yell! I love talking about it.

I recently completed my degree in Computing and IT through the Open University in an effort to legitimise my experience. I'm hoping to undertake a research degree in the near future.

You can normally get in touch with me on LinkedIn and while most of the stuff I have worked on in the past has been private, you can find the odd thing here and there on GitHub.

I look forward to getting to know you all more in the near future.

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